No light at the end of the tunnel for Royal Mail negotiations

theguardian.com:

V irtually the only point of agreement between the Royal Mail and the Communications Workers Union (CWU) on Wednesday was that talks ended at about 1.30am in the morning. The reasons for the failure of negotiations were, inevitably, disputed.

The company cited differences over terms and conditions for new employees – or, more precisely, whether lower rates should be equalised with the rest of the workforce over three years or five. The union called this a “selective” account and pointed to factors that would affect current staff, including whether a proposed trial for a new method of sorting mail was really a trial or had already been chalked up by management as a major cost saving.

Such is the nature of failed negotiations: each side points to different things and seemingly small differences, as outsiders might view them, become magnified. Sir Brendan Barber, former general secretary of the TUC and ex-chair of Acas, was in the room as a facilitator and is probably the only person qualified to give an impartial version, which he is obviously not going to do.

From outside one can only observe that both parties charged into this dispute a year ago at a million miles an hour. The board entered with a low-ball pay offer only months after spraying £400m on shareholders via special dividends and share buy-backs in late 2021. It was like waving a red rag, especially so soon after the pandemic. As Rico Back, former Royal Mail boss, has argued, instead of a confrontational approach, it would have been better to use the £400m to ease the inevitable transition away from letters and towards parcels.

The CWU, though, was slow to acknowledge that with the whoosh of the pandemic demand over, Royal Mail really was losing £1m a day and that